The Biggest Liberal Freak-out Since Summer 2012: We Are All Chris Matthews

All afternoon, on a temporary stage erected next to the student center at Hofstra University, Chris Matthews had been bantering with his human backdrop. A chilly breeze plucked leaves from the overspreading oaks and sprinkled them on the couple hundred kids waving signs below. With the second presidential debate on tap, Matthews would be here until the wee hours, interviewing guests under the harsh stage lighting, offering up his opinions to other hosts, and, when nothing was doing, grasping lightly at his jaw and conversing with the crowd in that trademark brass-section voice. "Your sign’s upside down! It’s LGBT; get it straight! HA!"

Stentorian, hysterical, and barely in control, Matthews is like the muppet version of a newscaster, Guy Smiley with an agenda and a bee sting. Like Sarah Palin, he’s one of those public figures you just can’t separate from his SNL caricature. But Obama’s no-show at the first debate did a funny thing to the relationship between Matthews and his viewers: it so far elevated the level of hysteria among the liberal base that they seemed to be right in step with the host’s death-wailing. "WHY DIDN’T OBAMA SAY THAT? WHY DIDN’T HE SAY THAT?" he had shrieked, utterly disregarding his panelists. "WHAT WAS ROMNEY DOING? HE WAS WINNING!" (A couple nights later, even Obama would acknowledge Matthews’s freak-out, joking to a charity dinner: "Four years ago I gave him a thrill up his leg; this time I gave him a stroke.")

In the two-week interregnum between debates, that primal terror had matured into a sense of import bordering on overwhelming. It is accepted fact that even for those who care deeply about elections, no one political event feels like it matters very much. (You’ve got to assume the incumbent had felt that way rolling into Denver.) But not tonight. Tonight was going to be Game Seven, Election Night three weeks early. As the digital clocks above the set ticked onward toward the 9:00 p.m. start, it was possible to see in Matthews’s hunched posture the quiet anguish of every Obama voter. The sideshow had at last become the everyman.

"Chris, we want to see you happier tonight than you were after the last debate," a student shouted in the waning minutes of pre-programming. Matthews spun his shoulders around.

"I don’t know," he said softly. "But you’ll see the verdict on my face." With that, he told the crowd he’d be back, and he gathered up his notebook and mug and hustled off stage to watch in private.

Ninety minutes passed. Most of the sign-wavers had ducked into the student center to attend the university-sponsored watch party. But I stayed at the set, watching the candidates circle and jab at each other on one of the courtesy TVs erected by the network. A few undergrads stayed, too, their Romney and Ron Paul and Obama signs flat on the ground next to them. Jim Wilson, the guy who follows Romney everywhere in a flag-draped pickup truck, ambled around in a yellow raincoat and knee-high socks, trailed himself by a documentary camera and making a show of pensively lighting his pipe. The driver of the campus shuttle bus stood in the back, hands in his pockets. We all watched without speaking, sealed in our own bubbles of concentration.

At 10:20, with ten minutes left in the debate, Chris Matthews reappeared onstage. Still holding his notebook, he picked his way around the edge of the broadcast desk and, for one tiny moment, looked out past the glare of the lights and offered the facial verdict he had promised: eyebrows raised and lips pursed quizzically in that "well how about this" face you make when free drinks arrive at your table. Sitting again in the anchor’s chair, though, he folded himself back into a posture of angst. Legs crossed. An elbow on the table and his chin in his palm as he watched Obama’s closing statement. You could see it, though; you could see it at the corners of his eyes that not only was Obama back, Chris Matthews was about to be back, too.

He let it all out like a balloon. On Romney: "He’s the kind of guy who won’t turn off his phone on the airplane, so you have to wait for him to take off." On Obama, one towering sentence: "The president won on the economy right up front; the oil thing was too complicated; he won on tas; he won on Lilly Ledbetter clearly; he won with that African-American guy who’s really been disappointed—he won with that guy; he won clearly on immigration; and he clearly won with the question at the end, where he took the foolish decision—and of course on Benghazi—that foolish decision by his opponent to raise the issue of 47 percent by saying 100 percent." He paused for perhaps a quarter of a second.. "He stuck his chin out and Obama punched him hard." Cheers from most of the sign-wavers.

It went on like this as the half-hour post-game show continued, led by Rachel Maddow in New York, her set made up to look like it was a skybox over the debate hall. Matthews piped up occasionally to share an emphatic endorsement of something Obama did or Romney didn’t do. He did not, though, go nuts. He did not, in his relief, come close to matching the intensity of his keening two weeks prior. Because for Democrats, that doubting, oh-so-worldly tribe, this is how it is: they know how to be pissed at their candidate. They almost delight in it as proof that politics is bullshit, the world ungovernable, and the populace at large too unenlightened to make the right choices. Wins, like the ones this evening, often just seem like temporary reprieves, not to be trusted.

Later in the hour, David Alrod joined MSBNC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in the spin room, and the audio wafted over the Matthews set a few blocks away. O’Donnell asked the strategist what Obama had done after walking off the stage in Denver, how he had come realize that he had screwed up.

"There was some gentle criticism from people like Chris Matthews and others," Alrod said.

"The president heard Chris Matthews?"

If Matthews himself was tickled at the mention, he barely showed it. He sat motionless, the curled index finger of one hand pressed against his mouth—perhaps smiling, perhaps not—the other holding his pen at the ready. It will take 18 days and 270 electoral votes to undo for him and the believers what the first debate did. Still, in the meantime, he will be rooting again. And he will probably be loud.

"Well yeah," Alrod continued. "But he didn’t have to watch TV to hear him; he could actually hear Chris without the TV."

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